Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California

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CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE

SERRA BEFORE CALIFORNIA

1. Island Son

2. The Call

3. A Professor, Wanting

4. To the Spanish Mainland

5. The Sea of Darkness

6. The Long Walk to Mexico City

7. New World Others

8. The Fat Mountains

9. Lost

10. Baja

PART TWO

CALIFORNIA BEFORE SERRA

11. Who They Were, What They Did, What They Believed

PART THREE

THE FIRST NINE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS

12. Mission San Diego de Alcalá: The Solace of Unfortunates

13. Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo: The Disappearing Oak of Monterey

14. Mission San Antonio de Padua: A Bell for a Woman Flying in Blue

15. Mission San Gabriel Arcángel: Wonder and War in the City of Angels

16. Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa y Tilini: A Prayer for Bears

17. Mission San Juan Capistrano: The Burning Swallows

18. Mission San Francisco de Asís (Dolores) and Mission Santa Clara de Asís: Microbes and the Great Franciscan Couple

19. Mission San Buenaventura and the Death of Serra

PART FOUR

IN THE SHADOW OF SERRA

20. Lasuén Completes the Mission

21. Secularization, Gold, and the Destruction of the Missions

22. The Serra Legend and the Question of Sainthood

Epilogue: Winter Solstice at Mission Santa Barbara

Afterword

Photographs

Sources and Acknowledgments

About Gregory Orfalea

Notes

Bibliography

Photo and Map Credits

Index

To Sister Mary Mark Schoenstein, O.P.

And in memory of Father John Columba Fogarty, O. Carm.

JOURNEY TO THE SUN

Anna Seile’s map of The Americas: A New Description, with outsized dagger-shaped California as island, 1663.

PROLOGUE

Who is God’s companion?

Junípero Serra might have contemplated this thought on the road in the Salinas Valley of California, where in 1771 he met an Indian woman who offered him a present. When he asked her name, she murmured Soledad, Spanish for solitude. Or at least that is what he heard: I was astonished, and turning to my companions said, ‘Here, gentlemen, you have María de la Soledad.’ He gave her glass beads for seeds; she nodded. As the name stuck to the place, Serra made a note to found a mission in that desolate, treeless spot. Soledad later became the most hard-luck mission of all those that were built on the coast.

Serra had undergone plenty of solitude, the soledad of the trail, the one that surrounded your neck like water at night, a soledad to conquer by singing Matins before first light. Not English or American solitude, which celebrated being on one’s own, without others; Spanish soledad, which longed for them.

Serra was not about soledad; neither were the Franciscan fathers. He’d swallowed his fill of it as a boy, losing two sisters and a brother, working the quiet fields of Petra, his home village on the Spanish island of Mallorca. But his father’s leather hand was always on his shoulder, and later his confreres’ abrazos; even those strangers in the confessional cut soledad with their pain. Serra respected the solitude Christ felt in the garden that last night of his life when the apostles slept. But Serra wasn’t Simon of the Desert, standing on his pillar alone. He loved community, loved performing marriages. He traveled as much as he could in a pair or group, because outside the mission walls lay a solitude so vast only the sun could disperse it.

Now the dew was on the leaf, the earth shorn briefly of dust. Dark and lovely and cool. The sun began its climb of the Santa Lucia Mountains, casting them in gray outline. As his mule snorted, taking him north in the early morning, the sun regarded Serra; he dared not look back. The sun warm on his forehead, rising over the crown of the forest, now arched in his mind above the Tramuntana range of his old island and its olive groves to the sea, the Mediterranean waded into the Pacific, the sun wrapping the world in its arms.

Who was God’s companion?

He was.

For a second, he looked at the sun; God put a white spot in his eye.

PART ONE

SERRA BEFORE CALIFORNIA

Nicolas Sanson’s map of The Isle of California and New Mexico, 1657.

CHAPTER ONE

ISLAND SON

I, the one who hugs you,

I am not alone!

—GABRIELA MISTRAL

Sancturi de Cura on Mount Randa, Mallorca.

At the darkest point of night, the point at which the light begins to grow, Miquel José Serre was born at 1 A.M. by the flickering of an olive oil lamp on November 24, 1713, in the little farming village of Petra, slightly east of dead center of the island of Mallorca, one of three Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain in the northwest Mediterranean. His father, Antonio, put a sprig of laurel on the door, indicating the baby was a boy; a myrtle branch would have meant a girl. Petra was a village of two thousand then, and it is barely larger today.

With a population of about seventy thousand, Mallorca had a climate of dry heat and white light. But it was no resort. In the eighteenth century, the island traffic consisted of horse and mule carts and men hoisting shovels. The nineteenth-century writer George Sand, visiting Mallorca to care for the sickly Frédéric Chopin, called the Mallorcan peasant a gentle, kind creature, with peaceful habits . . . he has no love of evil and knowledge of good . . . you can no more hate him than you could an ox or a sheep, for he is close to the savage whose soul is lulled in animal innocence.

With its whiff of Gallic superiority, this perception missed a key element: community. Peasant farmers in the Petra area who tended sheep, olive and almond groves, and citrus trees lived not in isolated huts in the field, but in town in seamlessly attached Santanyí sandstone homes situated along narrow, labyrinthine streets. They lived in close proximity, hearing each other’s coughs and moans and prayers through the clay walls and screenless windows. Though in our world these conditions would be taken as a sign of poverty, the peasant farming village community of eighteenth-century Spain was hardly downtrodden. People worked hard and were proud of it. Mallorcan peasant homes were sturdily made—clay, stone, tiled, or wattled roofs—and when little Miguel (the Castilian spelling of the Mallorquín Miquel) put his head out the window of his second-story bedroom he stared right across the narrow street at his double, a boyhood friend who put his own head out the window, and the signals of boys’ and girls’ heads and their calls down the street brought them to work in the field, to play, and to attend Mass on Sunday.

Serra’s comfort with and affection for close-knit village life was in his blood. He was benignly crushed together with his neighbors because his parents, Antonio Serra and Margarita Ferrer, had been so crushed. Natives of Petra, their families have been traced there as far back as 1577, though the direct lineage of Serra runs out by 1839. His father was baptized Antonio Nadal Serre on Christmas Day 1675. Serre is the strictly Mallorquín version of the word saw. In fact, a workman’s saw is on the Serra family’s coat of arms.

There is more than a little evidence that the boy who would grow up to be among the leaders of the first group of white men to walk into and stay in today’s California had Jewish blood. His paternal grandmother was named Juana Abraham. Abraham also could be a Europeanization of the Muslim name Ibrahim, so it is possible that he could have been of Arab extraction. Or both, since most Jews in Spain were Sephardic and traced their roots across North Africa back to Palestine. Also, as the Arabs spent five hundred years ruling Spain, clinging most tenaciously to little Mallorca until it was given up in 1229 (with shrewd allowance by James I of Aragon that Muslims retain some of their own civil and religious institutions), it’s not far-fetched to posit that his grandmother’s Old Testament (and Koranic) surname made Serra part Jew and part Arab.

The Inquisition, though diminished in its scope by Serra’s time, was not entirely abolished in Spain until the early nineteenth century, and had examined in its obsessive and murderous fervor several families in the sixteenth century named Serra. There is more than a little evidence that some of Serra’s ancestors through his father’s line were inspected (and suspected) as cuetas, that is, Mallorcan Catholics who had converted from Judaism—and perhaps Islam. (One historian also speculated that Serra descended in part from the love life of a freed fourteenth-century Moorish slave on Mallorca.) Serra himself—and his parents—had little, if any, consciousness of being descendants of Arabs or cuetas, but it would be surprising if Serra was not aware that the name had echoes attached to it, especially through his paternal grandmother. His strong and early fervor for Catholicism had an edge of the anxious assertiveness of the convert, or more accurately and suspiciously, the conversos, those who converted under pressure of persecution. In short, Serra may have had to prove himself more Catholic than the Catholic, which could be one explanation—though only one—for his later missionary zeal.

The hardihood of Miguel Serra’s mother, Margarita Ferrer, can be divined by the etymology of her surname. Ferrer derives from fierro, or iron; it suggests ironworkers in her past (or blacksmiths, herreros). Margarita had married Antonio Serra in Petra at St. Peter’s Church on August 7, 1707. She was twenty-nine, he was thirty-one. They had two children, a boy, Miguel, and a daughter, Juana. But both lives were quickly snuffed out.

The Miguel Serra we know today was named after a deceased sibling, as was his younger sister, Juana. Serra was a sickly boy, probably an asthmatic, thin and short even by Mallorcan standards. Aware that he was essentially a replacement child, born six years into his parents’ marriage, he must have had an acute sense of mortality, the preciousness of life. There is some speculation that the early losses of children in their infancy may have inclined Antonio and Margarita toward becoming a secular monk and nun—people operating outside the monastery in civil society known as tertiaries, or third order, of Franciscans. These losses almost certainly frightened them enough to do something with the new Miguel that was unusual for most Mallorcan families: he was baptized on the day of his birth rather than several days later, as was customary, as if daring the devil—or God—to take yet another child.

A procession of relatives and neighbors carrying laurel sprigs made their way to St. Peter’s, men in Moorish wool trousers, women dressed in long skirts, fringed shawls, and nunlike wimples, the midwife carrying the infant. The priest, Bartolomé Llado, poured water from a silvered shell over the baby’s forehead and blessed him as he was held by his godmother, Sebastiana Serra, Antonio’s sister, over the octagonal Santanyí sandstone font.

The majesty and shadow of the Arab Muslims in Spain flickers across Junípero Serra’s life from his earliest days as Miguel. Apparently, an obsession with how to deal with the Moor inside and out made a short entry at Serra’s baptism. When the midwife handed the infant Miguel to his mother, Margarita kissed him, probably for the first time. Why? Because it was Mallorcan custom to call the newborn a little Moor (un moret), withholding a kiss until he was rescued from unknown misery by Christian baptism. Moorishness was thus conflated on the island with original sin. The priest was thanked for his troubles with a basket of pears, and at the Serra home the celebrants were treated to cookies called paciencies, which were—as are pastries throughout the Arab world—touched with anise, that seed essential to licorice and goodwill.

• • •

The year Serra was born—1713—was also the bitter end of the complicated War of the Spanish Succession. The Hapsburg monarchy that descended from Ferdinand and Isabella had literally died out with Charles II, known as the Bewitched, who keeled over on November 1, 1700, childless. Just before Serra’s birth (and during the time of the crib deaths of his older sister and brother), Catalonia and Mallorca were pulled in great pain between two forces contending to rule Spain after the Bewitched: those of Philip of Anjou (France) and those of Charles of Austria, who had a Hapsburg coalition of England, Germany (with remnants of the Holy Roman Empire), and Holland.

The French were the largest immigrant group in Spain, a very visible presence with economic dominance, thus Francophobia had deep roots in Spain. In 1705, at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession, Frenchmen passing through Saragossa were beaten and murdered. The upper and middle classes sided with the Bourbons in the war, but the blue-collar and farm workers sided with the Hapsburgs. This did not later dispose the son of the soil Serra toward Philip of Anjou, whose climactic 1713 attack on Barcelona killed 9,700 citizens making a heroic but futile defense of their city, to which the Hapsburgs gave no relief. In the end, the Catalonians were alone against Philip. Serra was born the very year the city across the water from his island was smothered.

• • •

The death of their first two children thrust Antonio’s and Margarita’s already faithful lives into a spiritual zeal that made them usher their new precious son to Petra’s Franciscan friary, San Bernardino, at the earliest possible moment for his education. His mother was particularly protective of Miguel and did not allow any contact with anyone who could tamper with her children’s innocence. Margarita sternly ensured that no hair on the tongue (no trahe pelos en la lingua)—gossip—would mar his young spirit. His schooling began with trips to friends they had made among the friars, and by the age of six or seven became more formalized in a classroom.

For a precious three years, little Miguel had had the rule of the roost and the undivided affections of his parents. Then on January 28, 1716, his sister, Juana María, was born. Juana was to be an important figure in his early life, his one surviving sibling, and the only one to carry the Serra family’s blood forward with her own three children—one of whom died, one of whom became a priest, and one of whom produced a priest through a child, thus halting the Serra family forever at the altar. Five years after his dear Juana, Serra’s second sister (Martina María) was born, but Martina also died young. Three out of five siblings dead: it was a family sown in a bitter field, with love precious as gold.

• • •

Miguel was, presumably, especially close to his father, working with him in the orchards and fields from an early age. Like other children of his time and place, he probably awoke early at the casa solariega (ancestral home) at 6 Calle Barracar, before light, just as his mother and father did, as farms all over the world do not wait for light. Juana, his sister, probably arose and dressed before him, helping her mother knead dough for bread. As the Serras lived under the same roof with farm animals, Juana went to the cow in the front room of the house, bringing the candle close, feeling the warm udder, squeezing the withered teats. The land was often dry, and the island was in constant search for methods to catch the little rain that fell. But Juana squirted enough milk steaming in the chilled pail that her mother said to her, "Bon día, gratias"—naming the day in Catalán with a wisp of that French bon. Serra awoke to the smell of bread put in the bake oven out back near the pig wallow. Juana fetched it through chickens trembling out of the coop, where she took up a few warm, damp eggs.

Gradually, the sky grew blue—first so dark as to be indistinguishable from the sea, then cobalt, then royal as the Blessed Mother’s robes. Little Miguel hitched the mule for his father, and climbed aboard, his father holding the rein in one hand, a shovel over his shoulder in the other. They would spend the morning picking olives—winter olives, as they grew three-quarters ripe, the exact moment of the picking—between November and March. If it was January or February, they picked by the light of the white-blossoming almond trees, the amatllers. Miguel grew up thinking the earth itself was full of light, especially after the Epiphany on January 6, a beauty so strong it hurt the eyes. He climbed the olive trees with his sack attached to his belt and began to denude them. He picked olives by the light of incipient almonds, picked until his frail brown arms began to ache.

Mallorcan olives are small and green and have a slightly bitter taste. In Serra’s time they were the top export of the island—averaging 75 percent of Mallorca’s trade—most in the form of olive oil. The oil went north—to Marseilles, Amsterdam, London, even Hamburg, where it was used less for eating than to fill oilcans that lubricated the gears of the textile mills. In Marseilles, Mallorcan olive oil was made into soap.

After a day’s harvest, the Serra family would join the olive growers of the area surrounding Petra and add their harvest to full burlap sacks that would be hauled by mule train about forty miles west—nearly the island’s girth—over the chief mountain range, the Sierra de Tramuntana, to the northwestern port town of Soller. There ground the great circles of stone, the oil presses. Little Miguel may have accompanied this olive train with his father. Today there is a tunnel through the mountain; then there was no way to get the olives to press without mounting the steep rise on mule or on foot.

Returning to Calle Barracar, both Antonio and son Miguel would knock before entering and say, "Ave María Purísima (Hail Mary, Most Pure), and either Margarita or Juana would answer, Cancebuda sens pecat" (Conceived without sin). This homage to the Immaculate Conception of Christ’s mother, Mary—so particular to Mallorcans—is practiced even today.

Later, in summer, the work switched to harvesting wheat, carob, and the almond trees, whose bright flowers had grown husks to be picked and shucked, the white nuts stripped of their brown skin to make oil exported to the South and Central American colonies for medicinal balms and facial cosmetics. The almond had been brought to the island by the ancient Romans. (After the colonies received independence, Mallorcan almonds were shipped to Spain and Europe or kept locally for a sweet additive to milk, ice cream, and nougats.)

But until March, the olives consumed them. As the morning sun rose over the cross at the top of Ermita de Bon Any, little Miguel may have broken from his olive picking and walked up the steep hill to the shrine of Our Lady of the Good Year to ring the noon bells. Ermitas, or shrines, were all over Mallorca, and most remain. No hilltop was without an ermita or santuari (a monastery). Within a year of its construction in 1609, abundant rain fell on Mallorca, and thus the shrine was named Nuestra Señora de Bon Any—prayers were for a good year, meaning rain. Serra grew up with the 1663 bell of that miraculous shrine at the highest point of his gaze. He made his way to the breathtaking view, probably gulping for breath. Already winded by the toil in the olive groves, he walked the half mile to Bon Any up a steep dirt path. He would walk the asthma out of himself. If his lungs felt like two iron weights, he would walk.

At the top, looking out on the island, he might pray for family, animals, or fruit, then consume a lunch of orange-red Mallorcan sausage on bread, a slip of cheese. Climbing up the olivewood steps to the belfry, Miguel might ring the twelve bells that recalled not just the middle of the day, but the Twelve Apostles—Peter, Andrew, James, John (the first four).

At the top of Nuestra Señora de Bon Any, Miguel was 1,289 feet above sea level. The view from the belfry could take away what little breath he had left and lift him out of his wheezing body. Blue spangled in three directions: to the north Miguel saw the crescent Bay of Alcudia, which the Romans had entered two thousand years before to retake Iberia from Carthage. With apostles to the east—Philip, Bartholemew, Matthew, Thomas—the Santuari de Sant Salvador pointed to heaven just before the open Mediterranean. To the south and southwest, the far-off old Roman capital of Palma sparkled before the eye, lost in blue that stretched all the way to Algeria. The only direction blocked of a view of the sea was straight west—James, Jude, Simon, and Judas Iscariot—the Tramuntana Mountains. How he must have longed to see over that wall, to expand on the glimpse he got once a year near the olive press.

If he was coming down Bon Any or from the fields on an important feast day, he went to visit his godparents, Sebastiana Serra and Bartholmé Fiol, and kissed their hands with the traditional reverence Mallorcan children had and still have for godparents.

In the afternoons, Miguel went to school at the friary of the magnificent Franciscan church of St. Bernardine, perhaps the finest on the island outside Palma. Finished in 1677 and named for the fifteenth-century comforter of plague victims who denounced the fratricidal wars of Italian princes, San Bernardino was a place of deep mystery and wonder. Its Moorish steeple was gilded in gold and Baroque in style, its main altar unfolding to ten side altars, five on each side of the church. Each of these sub-altars had its own story with paintings of the saints, such as San Juan Capistrano, whose foot crushes the head of a Turk.

The only two academic subjects referred to by Serra’s first biographer and former student Francisco Palou (in discussing Serra’s boyhood instruction from the friars of San Bernardino) are Latin and plain chanting. But Serra certainly had lessons from among the sixteen Franciscan friars in religion, writing, mathematics, and reading. It seems likely that as a boy Serra read the lives of the saints, particularly Franciscan figures such as Raymond Lull, St. Bernardine of Siena, and St. Francis of Assisi. He may have even read a novel popular for two centuries in Spain called The Labors of the Very Brave Knight Esplandián (1510), whose knight hero ventures bravely to an island called California.

• • •

But the missionaries were the ones who truly captured his imagination. Raymond Lull has been called the greatest of medieval missionaries, and perhaps the greatest Christian missionary between St. Paul in the first century and the late eighteenth century’s Baptist-gone-to-India William Carey. As a Mallorcan, Lull had a special appeal to the young Miguel. Lull wrote—by hand, of course—over 250 books, some multilayered and complex, many with a strong emphasis on human love as a mirror of the divine (The Tree of Love; The Book of the Lover and the Beloved). He was fascinated, if not obsessed, with the Muslim world (perhaps out of guilt—when his black Muslim slave teacher of Arabic cursed a Christian for a racial slur, Lull had the slave imprisoned, where he committed suicide). Lull preached for much of his life, though not all of it, a peaceful Crusade, believing that salvation was to be won in people’s hearts and not on the battlefield with mace and longbow. Fluent in Arabic and well versed in the Sufi poets, Lull founded in 1276 what may have been the first (post-Muslim occupation) college in Spain for the study of Arabic, at Miramar in Mallorca. Thirteen Franciscan friars enrolled.

Born in Palma, Mallorca, in 1232—just three years after the Muslim leadership had abandoned the island—in his twenties Lull lived the dissolute life of a rich man’s spoiled kid—drinking, whoring; he hardly saw the inside of a church. He married and had two children but was regularly unfaithful. Though brilliant like Augustine, Lull was more of a poet (and mathematician). At thirty, removing himself to Mount Randa, he was casually writing a love poem to one of his paramours when he had a vision of Christ on the Cross. He fought off the vision, but it kept returning—three more times. Terrified at first, Lull realized that perhaps his life was about to change—and should. Soon after these disturbing visitations, he read the life of St. Francis, who had insisted on going directly to the Muslim caliph in Egypt to settle the problems between Islam and Christianity nonviolently. That Lull, a Mallorcan, had done virtually the same thing, except to Tunisia, stirred the heart of his fellow Mallorcan.

The Glow of Love. This is what Lull sought between antagonists— quixotically, perhaps, but not without deep grounding in his newfound Christianity. He writes in the Book of Contemplation: Men are wont, O Lord, to die from old age, the failure of natural warmth and excess of cold; but . . . Thy servant . . . would rather die in the glow of love.

Nevertheless, Lull’s rationalist mysticism came under the fire of two popes; the Inquisition condemned dozens of his teachings. At eighty, Lull quietly gained five high-ranking converts in Tunis, but when he went shouting the Trinity creed in the town square in Bugia, east of Algiers, he was stoned and mortally wounded, dying before reaching Mallorca and realizing thereby what one writer saw as the Franciscans’ mania for martyrdom.

• • •

Young Serra would not have had that mania, at least not yet. But he was deeply moved by Christ’s Passion. At San Bernardino, Serra would not have encountered Lull’s abstruse theology; that would have been later, in seminary at Palma. But he certainly would have been fascinated by Lull’s audacious love, a love that made him cross the waters to the Other. That Other had ruled over Mallorca and all of Spain; at its height had held Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in a rare balance in Andalusia; and was now a short boat ride south across the water. That Other had also magnetized his greatest hero.

St. Francis, who died two years before Lull’s birth but whose myth was growing exponentially in Lull’s time, also profoundly influenced young Miguel. In his schoolbooks, so much about the man who founded the Franciscans appealed to him: the fact that Francis was part French and loved Troubadour poetry; the fact that, as G. K. Chesterton would say centuries later, he never, all his life, exactly understood what money was; that he had all his life a great liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong; that Francis was forever being pulled like a deep tide driving out to uncharted seas of charity; that he kept up his fellow prisoners’ spirits in captivity; his boldness and dramatic nature; his instinct for creative monuments of peace; his absolute conviction that poverty leads to interior richness. Francis’s clarion call was to be a jongleur de Dieu, or (Chesterton again) the court fool of the King of Paradise—and this wild man of God absolutely captivated the demure farmer’s son.

Serra’s eyes could light up reading about St. Francis’s voyage to Egypt to convert the Sultan al-Kamil as his forces stood outside Damietta, under siege of the Crusade. St. Francis must have baffled the Muslim leader. He ordered the friars served a good meal ending with a kind of lemony sherbet made from the icy mountains of Lebanon.

It was, of course, simply the idea that it is better to create Christians than to destroy Moslems, wrote Chesterton about this extraordinary encounter. Francis spoke about Christ’s poverty, suffering, and return from the dead—themes that appealed deeply to Kamil, given his predicament. But when Francis offered to step into a fire to show that his God would protect him, the sultan, astonished, declined the contest. His subsequent offer of a truce and a return of Jerusalem to the Christians was inspired by this portentous meeting with the saint, who was allowed safe passage back to the Christian lines. But a squabble between King Jean of France and the cardinal on the spot foreclosed the truce. Francis withdrew. His peace mission ended with Kamil’s forces routed, beheaded, and dumped summarily outside the sultan’s camp.

How much of this story did Miguel Serra take away? And what lessons would he have learned? His beloved Francis—who praised Brother Sun and Sister Moon in his Canticle of the Sun—had failed in his peace mission to Islam, done in, in fact, by his own Christians. Better an enemy who listens than a friend who doesn’t?

What must have struck him most in the St. Francis story was the stigmata. Francis had returned from North Africa disconsolate about his failed mission, only to behold his followers in Italy availing themselves of a large manor in Bologna and living something of the good life. He railed against them as stridently as did Christ the Temple moneylenders, and he soon left for a mountain called Alverno. There a great mystery happened; when Francis came down from the mountain he was bleeding from holes in five places—in his hands, his feet, and his chest, just as Christ had on the cross. It was the first known stigmata in the history of the Church.

The farmer’s boy on peaceful Mallorca had more than a vague sense of the meaning of such a branding. There was, he learned, something holy in suffering.

• • •

During his schooling at San Bernardino in Petra, perhaps the most important thing Miguel Serra did was not study, but sing. He had a strong, mellifluous, deep voice, and the friars sensed his gift early, inviting him to join them when they sang the Divine Office on feast days.

Song surrounded the island at the May wheat harvest, with trilladors, men who harnessed mules to a cylindrical stone, cracking the wheat as they followed the animals and trilling. Song was crucial, too, to the most important holy day of the year then as now in Latino countries, Tres Reyes, or the Feast of the Three Kings or Wise Men on January 6, also known as the Epiphany. Tres Reyes is deemed more important—and certainly more magisterial and mysterious—than Christmas. It was accompanied in Mallorca by great theater. Children filled their shoes with long carob pods, then placed the shoes on window sills or balconies, in supplication to the Wise Men, who would replace the pods with gifts. In Petra on January 5, the three men would come galloping into town in glittering saddles and colorful clothes as if they were kings from the far reaches of the world (at least one would be Muslim, not so far off). Dimoni, or devil figures, would lurk around them, symbolizing what the kings had to overcome to view the Creator in swaddling clothes.

On January 6, a great morning Mass was said at St. Peter’s, where not only Communion but fresh hot bread (pan de promesa, the bread of promise) brought by the villagers was given to each congregant, who in Serra’s childhood were often made hungry by drought. The actor kings came to the altar with a real lamb to give the infant figure in the manger, played by one of the better-behaved babies. And then a young boy with a bell-like voice would sing the sibila, a solemn, but hopeful reminder of the end of the world at the commemoration of its Christian beginning. Perhaps Serra was one with that bell inside.

At the end of Mass, a basket of sweets and meat pies, the cucaña (piñata in Mexico), suspended by colorful ribbons across the church, was cut down with a sword and children such as Miguel would come running to scoop up the rewards, modern equivalents of the Wise Men’s gifts.

Did Miguel throw his candy at someone? We do not have a boyhood ne’er-do-well or coming-of-age story of Miguel Junípero Serra. We do not have a story of transgression, such as Augustine’s stolen pears. We don’t even have a story of brash goodness in his teen years, such as Francis of Assisi’s throwing off his fine clothes to a beggar. What we do know is that on return from school or church, his parents would give him the common blessing, May God make a saint of you (Deu te faci un sant). Another common prayer in the form of song was known as the Alabado, perhaps the most widespread song from the early days in Hispanic America, which originated among the Franciscan missionaries of Mallorca and no doubt was sung in Petra at San Bernardino by little Miguel himself. It derived, too, from a common greeting the young Serra heard every day on Mallorca, "Alabado sea Dios" (Praise to God).

But there was something else Miguel Serra must have heard even before he spied it through the arched colonnades of San Bernardino. It was a short whip with metal tailings, commonly used by monks in the eighteenth century. The muffled cry of a friar drew him, as if he might help him in his suffering. But what he saw would have confused him. The priest did not want help. He may later have explained he was trying to be like Christ, to help expiate the sins of the world. It did not make sense to the boy Serra, such blood drops on stone. But sacrifice, the kind of backbreaking work his father was introducing him to in the almond groves, did.

The boy probably recoiled from the disciplina, as it was called. It was too cruel for the world he knew in Mallorca, even one of such hard work, because there was serenity in Sunday afternoons, togetherness. There were the amatllers. Their light. Christ did not whip himself. He was whipped by the soldiers who made fun of him, who drew lots for him, who pressed thorn bushes into his head.

Serra was an unusually intelligent boy. Everyone could see it—his father and mother, his sister, Juana, his godparents, the friars at San Bernardino. And though like any teenager he had his questions, no doubt most were held down. But some days, such as one scaling the hard high road up the Tramuntana with his father’s pack train of olives, they could visit him mutely: Why did you create the world in the first place? Why did the boy I am named for die before I breathed? Above Soller at last, Miguel Serra would have seen the sun’s ladder on the water leading west. It shimmered silver. It roiled his eyes. When he closed them, the darkness behind his lids bloomed. Sunspots. Opening them, the water was illuminated like a manuscript. Like all Mallorcans, he read it.

From that vision, Miguel and his father would come back with the mules without olives, their burden lightened. As they slowly moved through the light of the almond trees, Miguel might forget his questions. The world was too beautiful for answers.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CALL

I consecrate you, God, because you love so much

Because you never smile; because your heart

Must all the time give you great pain.

—CÉSAR VALLEJO

Soller, site of the old Mallorca olive press over the Tramuntana massif.

What calls a boy to the priesthood? Unlike today, celibacy was, for the most part, accepted by eighteenth-century Mallorcans; priestly status and its requirements were revered. Palou, whom Serra would meet as a seminarian in Palma, tells us that as soon as his parents apprehended their boy’s holy vocation they whisked him to the city of Palma.

But how did Miguel’s parents realize his holy vocation? Was it something he said or had done? Was it what some have called an itch that longs to be scratched? One acclaimed poet thought that when common fishermen put everything down to walk away to follow Christ as the Twelve Apostles, that was the most miraculous thing of all.

For fifteen-year-old Miguel Serra, it may have been nothing particularly inspiring. In eighteenth-century Europe, the calling was more likely poverty itself. The priesthood was a position of esteem to the rural poor, and particularly so on Mallorca. A sizable portion of the people on the island were in religious orders, either as priests, nuns, monks, or tertiaries, or were working closely with them. To be a priest was to elevate oneself up the social and even political ladder, as no ruler and his lieutenants could operate without significant consultation with, if not outright blessing from, the clergy. Priests may have taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but they never took one against power.

So what Antonio and Margarita Serra realized about their precocious, fervent son may have had more to do with what they knew about their own predicament. They were farmers. They were going nowhere beyond beautiful, poor Petra and its hard soil. Their one chance at ascension was through this frail boy given to them after two infant deaths. The friars at San Bernardino may have felt something similar. Send this one to Palma. Send this one to the Great Outer World.

Palma, which in 1728 had a population of roughly thirty-five thousand (perhaps half that of the island), was seventeen times the size of Petra. To the young Serra, it was an imposing, walled metropolis. If Mallorca is shaped like a horsehead, Palma is where the bit catches the back of the mouth. And it caught him. The skinny, short boy of fifteen studied under the canon (perhaps Don Antonio Figuera) at the cathedral for a year. La Seu, as the cathedral is called in Catalán, was built over a mosque shortly after James I of Aragon retook the island from the Muslims in 1229. It dominates the skyline of Palma, the finest example of Mediterranean Gothic architecture due in part to its sensations of light . . . in comparison with the shadows of other, darker Gothic churches across the continent. If the teenage Serra hiked to the Bellver Castle—also of thirteenth-century vintage, with a sweeping view of the Bay of Palma—he would have seen how the southern sun coming out of Africa stuns La Seu as it sits astride the bay like a galleon. The sun could kiss it at all hours of the day, wrote a Spanish artist. The Cathedral of Palma is an island in the heart of an island. The rose window, with 1,236 pieces of glass radiating from a red center to blue to yellow at the corona, flooded all three naves of La Seu with rose afire.

Moving from his study with the canon in one of the chambers of the cathedral into the central nave bathed in roseate light would have pulled Serra into the center of the rose, where the great Christian mystics lived. He must have experienced some fundamental shift, as within six months after turning sixteen, he applied to enter the Franciscan order. He was turned down. He seemed too young and rather sickly, according to Palou. But there may have been another reason: up until the seventeenth century—for over a hundred years—if you had the surname Serre, you came into the crosshairs of the Inquisition. Add this to his grandmother’s surname Abraham, and it spelled fear of the cueta.

Just before he turned seventeen, Serra tried again; this time he passed muster. On September 14, 1730, he was given the Franciscan gray wool habit (gray for the ashes of mortality) and the signature rope cincture by the provincial for Mallorca, Antonio Perelló Moragues. He would cling to it for fifty-four years, until it was threadbare halfway around the world.

• • •

Almost as if snared, Miguel Serra was taken out of the rose light of La Seu, and for a year outside the city of Palma he studied as a novice at the Convento de Santa María de los Angeles de Jesús. Set in a wooded upland, the Convent of Jesus (its shortened, Anglicized name) was in all its parts consonant with . . . poverty, its much smaller Gothic church topped with a Middle Eastern–like pyramid. There was a view of the mountains to the north and the towers of the Palma cathedral to the south. Serra was sent there because the Franciscans were trying to see if the new entrant to the order could take its ascetic rigors before pronouncing solemn vows of self-denial a year hence.

It meant long swaths of spiritual reading, prayers, silence. No one was allowed to visit him; he could not write letters; letters that came were thrown away. At midnight, Serra was roused from sleep by his master, Antonio Corrio, to sing out the Compline in Gregorian chant. He had less godward tasks to do daily, such as sweep the floors, take out chamber pots full of excrement and urine to trenches in the woods, prepare the meals. But he came up literally short on one of the higher duties at Mass—turning the sizable sheepskin pages of the choir book with their large print and musical notes for the choir. In a word, he was too short to reach it. Serra was probably less than five feet at this point. He confessed to Palou, When I was a novice I was always sickly and very small of body, so small I could not reach the choir rack. He did serve Mass in other ways—answering the Latin of the priest, filling the cruets with wine and water, handing the priest the purificator, a white linen cloth on which the crumbs of Christ fell and with which the priest wiped his hands and mouth of the holy.

A year later, he puckishly conceded that a little miracle had occurred: After making the vows I began to grow in strength and health and succeeded in reaching a medium stature. It was hardly a growth spurt; Serra as a man was five foot two. But for him, that two-inch miracle was enough to convince him he had made the right choice. He echoed an Egyptian Jew who lived in the century before Christ: All good things came to me with the coming of this.

• • •

During his year of novitiate outside Palma in the dark grove, Miguel Serra read voraciously, a habit from early school days with the Franciscans in his native Petra. The same year two Spanish Franciscans were beatified—that is, made Blessed by the pope—almost four centuries after their martydoms. They were Brother Peter Duenas and Father John of Cetina. In 1397, the two had gone to the southern tip of Spain to evangelize the last remaining Moors of the peninsula, in Granada. They were promptly captured and beheaded. Peter Duenas was only nineteen, less than two years older than Serra at the time of beatification. Duenas’s grisly end may have shaken the novice; more likely, it moved him in the throes of his early zeal for Christ to thoughts of flinging himself away to far-off lands.

For Franciscans at the inception of their order, the far-off lands were those inhabited by Arabs. Serra read deeper into the mystical life of Raymond Lull (dead in Algeria) and, of course, St. Francis of Assisi (turned away empty-handed in Egypt and heartbroken as his own Crusaders raced to the slaughter). More and more, the Moors held a fascination for him as an Other, one he saw in arches all over Mallorca, and an Other lurking inside his own frail body, if not soul.

Slowly the Moor and the Indian, to whom Franciscans had been ministering in the New World for two centuries, elided in his vision of the perfect kind of imperfection—those who embodied fertile ground for Christ’s message of love and salvation. The recent beatifications of those trying to convert the Arabs (forget that the Arabs contained among them the earliest of all Christians, as did the Jews) echoed the canonization, when he was only thirteen, of a missionary to Peru, Francis Solano. A great celebration at the Bernardine monastery in Petra in 1726 marked the first naming of a saint in Serra’s young life. Born in Granada in 1549 (not long after that last bastion of the Moors fell), Francis Solano had a practice, when his Franciscan novices did wrong, of blaming himself. He used a natural disciplina, throwing himself through patches of cactus. Solano also ministered to the plague-stricken in Granada in 1583, many of them conversos, and even broke out with the buboes himself. But it was Solano’s mission to Peru and the Incas that fascinated Miguel Serra the most. In 1589, caught in a bad storm off the coast of Peru, Solano’s ship broke in two, drowning several blacks he had refused to leave when others abandoned ship. A gifted sermonist, Solano railed against the corruption of the new Spanish aristocracy.

Francis Solano’s attitude toward Blacks and Indians was wonderful, noted Father Agusti Boadus Llavat, chief Franciscan archivist in Barcelona. He worked against slave traders.

Though Serra did not speak in tongues or effect miracles by it, as Solano was said to have done, he had a beautiful singing voice, an echo of Solano’s mastery of the lute.

Chief among Serra’s other favorite saints were Augustine and Teresa of Avila—though for very different reasons. With Teresa, it was her long bout with sickness that emboldened suffering, something that the asthmatic Serra understood. With Augustine, the attraction was, as it had been for over a thousand years, vicarious sex. Augustine to pubescent Catholic boys of Serra’s generation was what The Miller’s Tale was to Chaucer’s contemporaries or Tropic of Cancer would be to Henry Miller’s in the twentieth century. Some intrepid Spanish seminarians of the era may have traded guffaws over the bawdier lyrics of the Roman poet Catullus or saucier passages in the vernacular of Cervantes. But for most, Augustine was it.

In the Confessions, Augustine scoffs that a celibate life would never be his. He famously loved, took a long-term mistress, and had a child out of wedlock. A Manichaean (who believed evil and good were equally strong in the world, led by an equally powerful God and Devil) and master rhetorician, Augustine’s pride—and sexual proclivities—kept him outside Christianity throughout his twenties into his early thirties. His mother, Monica—for whom Santa Monica in California is named and whose statue stands at the western terminus of Wilshire Boulevard in front of the Pacific Ocean—prayed for years for the turn of his soul, to no apparent effect. She even tried to set him up with a young bride to anchor his passions, but that didn’t work. Augustine understood that God existed, but it brought him no pleasure and no desire to join the Christian throng: I was too weak to find my joy in you. I prated as if I was well-instructed, but I did not know enough to seek your way in Christ our Savior. The climax of Augustine’s long spiritual ordeal comprises one of the greatest pages in the entire psychology of religion. It’s the moment he retreats to the umbrella of a fig tree, breaking into tears, sobbing, How long? How long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? And then he hears the strangely simple, yet immortal Latin injunction, Tolle. Lege. Pick it up. Read it. It was a voice of a boy or a girl, I know not which coming from a nearby house in Milan where he had been teaching. To Augustine, it was nothing short of a divine directive, for he went into the house where he had been fitfully reading the Bible, opened it up randomly, stabbed his finger in a frenzy that landed on a passage of St. Paul and read it: Let us walk becomingly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in debauchery and wantonness, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and as for the flesh, take no thought of its lusts. Similar to St. Anthony, Augustine was stunned: There was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished. For Augustine, this conversion was directly related to a major turn away from the flesh.

As far as we know or can even divine, Serra didn’t experience a conversion of this sort. No doubt, with his love of the sun, the injunction just before the Pauline passage he stabbed may have hit him harder: Lay aside the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light. Just as Augustine gathered new Christians around him to guard him from despair when his mother suddenly died, Serra may have felt the call to the Franciscan community as a way out of nagging loneliness at the center of his island—and his parents’ hearts.

• • •

While at the Convent of Jesus outside Palma, Miguel Serra took up the reading of the immensely popular fourteenth-century classic, The Little Flowers of St. Francis (or Fioretti). The unknown author, who lived a generation after St. Francis in or near Assisi, had essentially taken down the most outlandish and inspiring of stories about Francis and the band of brothers he gathered around him. Serra could have taken his name from Brother Angelo, once a fearsome knight who kept his proud bearing as a friar. Leone would have been a dramatic name to adopt. Brother Leone’s astonished discovery of the stigmata on Francis’s feet, tearing off bandages to see the blood gushing from the wounds of Christ on his own companion, was enough to make the brother swoon that he will be destroyed by the power of this love. Instead, on the eve of his more formal profession of vows on the road to the priesthood, Miguel Serra chose Junípero, known as the clown of God.

It was a strange choice, as there wasn’t a clownish bone in little Miguel’s serious body. Even as he grew to manhood, and taught philosophy at the university in Palma, his own sense of humor had a decidedly stinging quality, like that of brilliant academicians. So who was this Brother Juniper who served as his namesake?

Certainly he was, in the best sense of the word, crazy. His antics included cutting off silver bells from the altar cloth at the main Franciscan monastery and giving them away to a beggar woman, walking half naked in the marketplace with a bundle of clothes on his head, going silent for six months, and cooking a meal for the friars he thought would last a fortnight all in one giant pot. Juniper threw in several live chickens without plucking them, and dozens of eggs in their shells. Repelled, the friars rebuked Juniper for wasting so much food. Juniper answered humbly, smiling ear to ear, that he was just trying to save time. Then he prostrated himself, begging them to cut out his eyes and then hang him, before he walked merrily away.

Once, when entering Rome to an admiring and growing throng who knew of his closeness to Francis, Brother Juniper spotted two children seesawing on what appears to have been a crude sawhorse. Brother Juniper gently moved one off, took his place on the plank, and began seesawing with the other. The crowd laughed and clapped. But Juniper didn’t get off or wave. He was totally entranced and kept doing it long after the crowd and even the child left. The emblematic story of Brother Juniper, however, concerns the pig’s foot.

One day a friar, racked by a painful illness, was asked by Juniper if there was anything he could get him to ease his pain.

Oh, for a tasty pig’s foot! the friar said.

Brother Juniper did not waste time. He grabbed a butcher’s knife from the priests’ kitchen, took off to a local wooded area where some pigs were foraging, and promptly cut off a foot. He ran back with the bloody stump, cooked it, salted it, and gave it to the fellow monk in his agony, who ate it with avidity, to Junípero’s delight.

The swineherd, however, was not impressed. He’d seen the apparently mindless butchery and ran to tell the lord of the estate, who soon followed the bloody trail to the Franciscan monastery and gave Francis a piece of his mind. For Francis, whose love of justice was acute, this was one prank too many. Apologizing, Juniper flung himself on the man’s neck and embraced him, an inspired Groucho. The lord was so moved he gave the entire pig to the monks, who had themselves one fine ham roast.

Would to God, my brethren, that I had a forest of such Junipers! Francis sighed. No surprise there is neither date nor place of birth for Brother Juniper; such people seem to have lit down from the empyrean. It was a blithe spirit young Serra hoped to call on.

And so after a year of his novitiate, on September 15, 1731, kneeling before the Franciscan provincial Antonio Perelló Moragues, Miguel Serra took the spiritual name of Junípero just before reciting vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Franciscan order. An editor of Palou’s writings about Serra ventures that it was Brother Juniper’s ready wit and epigrammatic speech that appealed to Serra, but Brother Juniper’s wit was, if anything, burlesque, and his speech seems to have been marked not by epigram so much as utter guilelessness. At the end of his university philosophy lectures, Serra would typically praise the Trinity, Blessed Mother Mary, and then several saints, the last of whom was always Brother Juniper. He even carved a Brother Juniper woodblock to print holy cards as gifts. This clown of God, to him, was the greatest exemplar of holy simplicity. So it was simplicity he admired the most, the Gift to be Simple, as the Quakers memorably sang in the part of the New World that was least Spanish. The year Serra took his vows on Mallorca, half a world away Benjamin Franklin founded the first public library in the British colonies in Philadelphia. A year later, George Washington would be born.

Serra was not simple. In fact, he had none of the guilelessness of Brother Juniper, or that radical humility, and in his adult life he would chastise himself often in print and in front of others for harboring pride in his heart of hearts. In short, Brother Juniper was everything Serra was not. Perhaps he was forcing on himself an identity he longed for, but that continually escaped him—an Other, an innocent he would search for his whole life.

Serra was nearly eighteen years old when he took Moragues’s hands at the Convent of Jesus, and with a vision of blue surrounding him forever, he said in a raw voice, his eyes tearing from the incense, I, Fray Junípero Serra, vow and promise to Almighty God, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to Blessed Father Francis, to all the saints, and to you, Father, to observe the whole span of my life the rule of the Friars Minor confirmed by his Holiness, Pope Honorius III, by living in obedience, without property, and in chastity.

In addition, an extra vow—peculiar to Mallorcan Franciscans—was spoken by Serra, to propagate the dogma not yet accepted by Rome, that is, that Christ’s mother, Mary, was conceived without original sin from the first moment of her existence. This put Mary almost on the same level as Christ; if not God herself, she was the mother of God and quite simply—perfect. To Catholics, only Christ and Mary were born spotless, with no bent even in the smallest way toward evil. Serra’s lifelong devotion to Mary and her Immaculate Conception was sealed. For a man fated to live among men, it was more than the normal nod toward the feminine. It was as solemn a vow as his priesthood.

• • •

On December 18, 1731, Serra completed his philosophy course with a flourish, scripting his conclusion like a funnel (or chalice) on his scroll, saluting all the citizens of heaven (including the most special patron of my heart—Bernardine of Siena), adding with a wry note: Just as we finish the small logic, so [too] the great by the grace of God. At the tip of the funnel he wrote boldly in a banner, Friar Junípero Serra of the Minor Order, faithfully writing. Touching the banner was a heart with five wounds (cinco llagas), Francis’s stigmata; but also a hint: faithful writing involved suffering.

Did the Franciscans have a special mark that attracted Serra above other monastic orders tracing themselves all the way back to St. Anthony of Egypt in the third century? He could have signed up with the Benedictines, one of the oldest orders, founded on Monte Cassino in 529 by a monk who stressed manual labor; the Carmelites, begun in 1206, may have been too brooding and mystical; but the famously bright Jesuits founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534 may have appealed, if not the Dominicans started by Francis’s own friend, Dominic, in 1216, who reached their height with the great theologian and doctor of the church Thomas Aquinas and their nadir with the Inquisition’s Torquemada. However, though it may have been a close call philosophically with the teaching order Dominicans, Serra picked the Franciscans because the Franciscans picked him. They were his teachers in Petra at the Convent of St. Bernardine; they whisked him to their own in Palma. Serra loved stories of sacred brashness and humility, and St. Francis’s life spoke directly to him, as did Brother Juniper’s. They also appealed to his flair for the dramatic. The Franciscans’ zesty answer to the call to set sail in your life as a missionary tugged at an island person to whom the sea was ever-present and insistent. What may have cinched the deal: only one order was given protectorate of the Holy Places in Palestine, especially Jerusalem—the Franciscans. It is still so today.

Berkeley theologian Kenan Osborne reflects that Serra may have been attracted to three Franciscan predilections: the centrality of Jesus; the closeness to nature (the sun and moon as brother and sister); and the primacy of the Gospel (Franciscans are attracted to the Gospel in almost a mystical way—not the way of Thomas Aquinas).